I have a Windows 7 Enterprise client (it's my own workstation, and I'm the network administrator). It's the only Windows 7 enterprise client in the building right now. Frequently this machines loses the ability to find one -- just one -- of the twelve servers in our AD domain. Symptoms: at some point after logon, it could be a matter of minutes, hours, or days, the Win 7 Enerprise client will "lose the ability" to find shared resources on a particular server -- not all servers, just on a particular one. The resources could be file shares accessed via Windows Explorer, or by means of shortcuts, or they could be printers. A common symptom of the problem can be seen in Windows Explorer: a drive mapped to a share on this server will appear with a red "X" next to it, after once having been connected; but, interestingly, drives mapped to shares on other servers will also have the red X, but if you click them the connection is restored immediately; not so on the server that gets lost. The server that "gets lost" happens to be a file and print server that also functions as one of our three DC's, and is a GC, DNS, and DHCP server. We have over one hundred clients connecting to shares on the very same server, in the same domain and subnet, with no trouble. Other facts: domain has been stable for nine years since conversion to AD. We are running WinServer 2003 SP2. DNS is functioning properly; I can ping the "lost" server by name even while I cannot connect to shared resources on the server with the \\servername\sharename format; I can connect using the \\IPaddress\sharename format; but again, the issue is not DNS because the connection is lost after it is first established, not on the original attempt or at logon. The Windows 7 Enterprise client is the only Win 7 client on the network that is used every day; all others are Windows XP machines. The Windows 7 client had a clean Windows 7 install, not an upgrade from Vista; client was formerly a Win XP machine. The only way to solve the problem and to restore the ability for the workstaton to be able to access resources on is a complete reboot of the workstation -- after which, everything is fine, at least for a while. I have noticed many other similar posts, but all describe symptoms of the problem -- not the problem itself, which as far as I can see at this point is perhaps some sort of bug in Windows 7, or some other obscure issue. On our network, the only thing that's changed is the operating system on that one Windows 7 Enterprise Edition computer -- that's it. Any help, shared experiences, insights appreciated.

This sounds to me like an IPv6 issue. I've had problems with DNS and IPv4/IPv6 here. Do you have IPv6 disabled on the win7 machine? If so, check your DNS server and see if you have a Forward DNS IPv4 entry for the workstation, I'll bet you don't. Try re-enabling IPv6 and see if it works.

Hi, This issue can be caused by firewall. Please temporary disable firewall and check the result. If the issue still occurs I suggest you enable NTLMv2 in the Windows Server 2003 server. Information Management Systems & Services.. Please note that this article suggests to change the policy to “Send NTLMv2 response only\refuse LM and NTLM”. Since most computers in your domain are Windows XP computers, I suggest you change the policy to “Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”.Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

i am using windows 7 trying to access the server (window server2008) i can access by \\IPAddress\share but i can't access by \\servername\sharename as a user but i can as an Admin i'm not sure what happened. this is also a FTP server i am having FTP issue with Vert Drive do another machine but it works on the local. could this be related?

How would one do this?